Seagate's new Backup Plus drives put social networks in the front seat

Seagate is announcing this week Backup Plus, its new line of USB 3.0 drives.

The biggest feature in the new drives is the ability to directly backup photos posted to Facebook and Flickr. Seagate says the feature, dubbed "Save", was created in response to the uptick in the number of people taking photos with their phones. Seagate plans to add more services as time goes on.

Social networks are also a part of "Share", a feature that allows users to batch upload files instead of working with them one at a time.

Seagate has also furnished the drives with NTFS drivers, which allow them to work with on both Macs and PCs without the need for reformatting. (As with Toshiba's recent Canvio drives, this is a feature we've been seeing a lot of lately.)

Sizes for the desktop drive run up to 4TB ($249), while its portable counterpart maxes out at a single terabyte ($139).

The big question here is this: Has there even been any demand for local back ups of social network photos in the first place? Somehow I'm not so sure.